From the Mind of Trevor Stone

I just posted this on a Burning Man mailing list in response to a document encouraging use of "person-first language" in the context of mental health. It collects some thoughts I've had for awhile, and I think are worth sharing more broadly.


I feel that using a term like "my neighbor who has autism" rather than "my autistic neighbor" creates a sense that autism is a temporary condition—similar to "my neighbor who has a sports car"—or is somehow separate from their identity as a person, similar to "my neighbor who walks with a limp." As someone who may be on the autism spectrum[1], being an aspie is a pretty core piece of my identity. No matter what I do in my life, I'm never not going to be on the autism spectrum[2]; there's no drug or therapy that will cure me of Asperger's syndrome. And for me it's not even a "side trait" like the fact that I have brown hair or am "kinda tall". Autistic traits like spatial-symbolic thought, deep interest in narrow topics, complex language use, and detailed rule systems are some of the things about *me* that I'm likely to emphasize if I'm writing my own biographic blurb.

(Also, autism isn't a mental illness, any more than being left-handed is a physical illness. It's a different way of processing stimuli and thinking about the world. Autistic people's brains work differently, but they're not sick.)

As someone who loves the nuances of language, I share the interest in adopting terminology which uplifts people facing challenges and moving away from insulting language. Unfortunately, I find the position of person-first language to be frequently underwhelming and counterproductive. A couple examples:

The document that D shared encouraged the use of "person who experiences substance abuse challenges" instead of the term "alcoholic." The former is fifteen syllables long and sounds very clinical, even sterile. "Alcoholic" is four syllables long and has a rhythm to it: two syllables end in "L" and the other two have a hard "C". The double hard "C" gives the word punch: hearing someone say "My name is Chris and I'm an alcoholic" has an impact in our auditory pathways in a way that "My name is Chris and I experience substance abuse challenges" does not. And a statement like, "My name is Chris and I have a problem with alcohol" sounds to me like a weasel word that avoids the full impact of what's going on; it suggests that "If I could just solve this one problem, I could drink like a normal person."

At a different event, some friends of mine run a Phoenix Circle for people in recovery. They identify as alcoholics and use that term, because they see it as a key piece of who they are: their brain responds differently to alcohol than typical people do, and they need to keep that awareness in place in order to avoid doing themselves harm by relapsing. And they were able to make significant progress in overcoming this challenge by recognizing their alcoholism and how it's something that's always going to be part of them. They're not going to stop being an alcoholic, but they CAN (and did) stop drinking alcohol. This way of framing things might not be the solution for everybody, but there are a lot of folks that it has worked for.

Perhaps the first time I heard about people-first language was a campaign to use the term "people experiencing homelessness" rather than "homeless people." The former is a mouthful to say (ten syllables versus four), and yet it still "others" the people in question. We don't use the phrase "people experiencing homeownership," we say "homeowners." We don't say "people experiencing wealth", we say "rich people." We don't say "people with high physical strength", we say "strong people." Despite a goal of changing language to remove stigma, this creates a lexicon of phrases which are said out loud only used when referring to marginalized people.

The document starts by saying "We have all heard derogatory terms used to describe
someone who has a mental illness. Here are a few to jog your memory: Cuckoo; Mad as a hatter; Screwy–having a screw loose; Bananas; Loopy; Crackers; Wacko (whacko); Loony; Nuts; Freak; Crazy; Weirdo." In my lexicon, several of those words are descriptive, not derogatory, and they have nuanced meanings. I will often self-identify as a weirdo; I've never thought of the word as being about mental illness and more about having interests and behaviors that are outside the mainstream. (Black Rock City is a place full of weirdos, and that's what makes it so fun.) Likewise, "freak" is often used as a term of self-identity, particularly when prefixed with a classifier like "music freak" or "climbing freak." To my ear, it's only derogatory if the speaker has a negative opinion of the thing the freak is into. I use "loopy" to describe a specific set of cognitive behaviors, which can be brought on by lack of sleep, independent of cognitive ailments. In my family, "crazy" is used as a judgement-free descriptive term for many of our good friends. In our house, "Bob is crazy" isn't a positive or negative sentiment; it's just a non-awkward way of saying "Bob has some significant mental health illnesses." And an interesting note on "Mad as a hatter:" the association between hatters and mental illness stems from the 19th Century use of mercury in hat making; it's a physical neurologic illness that manifests like a mental illness.

The way I think about social language, the goal should be to *change the negative perceptions of mental illness and substance use,* not to change the words we use to describe them. We can keep the psychoacoustic power of a word like "alcoholic" or "crazy" while speaking positively about the person. (My family thinks highly of many of our crazy friends.) The document says "Person-first language separates the individual from the symptoms they experience." This strikes me as striving for a sort of Cartesian dualism, that there's a self which is somehow independent of mental and physical sensations[3]. When I've had physical illnesses, I don't want to separate and compartmentalize those experiences: my body hurts, my body's not working the way I want it to, but by gosh it's happening to *my* body, not some avatar in the metaverse. Some of those physical ailments are temporary, and can be overcome through action, medical intervention, or the passage of time. Others will be with me the rest of my life: I have achalasia (a physical illness) and it's important that I remain in touch with my body when I experience trouble swallowing: the symptom isn't separate from me, it's part of me[4].

It strikes me that mental illness is even more personal in this regard: many physical illnesses are available to our normal senses: we can look at a broken arm or an arthritic joint and understand the physics of how it works, or compare it to other arms and joints to see how it's different. But our mental experiences are in a rich inner world that's not easily accessible to other people, and difficult to measure with our usual sensory apparatuses. A person may be able to overcome a mental illness, but that illness isn't something that's happening separate from the person: it's going on in their mind, in their brain, in their body, and in their daily life. And I want to honor that experience with a word that carries the power of the challenge that they're facing, not a long phrase that sounds like it's from a clinical research paper. The more short syllables with hard consonants the better. If there are words with negative connotations that we want to move away from, let's make sure to pick words that have a similar strength when we hear them out loud. I tend to find words with a germanic root carry more power than polysyllabic words that came from Latin during the Renaissance. And if a word is easy to say and has a good ring to it, people are likely to actually use it in the course of normal conversation.

Acknowledgement: my focus on syllables and phonemes here was inspired in large part by George Carlin's excellent piece on soft language.

[1] By the time I learned what the autism spectrum was I'd learned enough about my own peculiarities and how to interface with the world that I've never pursued a clinical diagnosis. I hear people talk about their experiences with autism and read descriptions of Asperger's syndrome and think "That sounds a lot like the way I think and behave."
[2] Depending on where one draws the edge of the spectrum, I suppose.
[3] The phrase "mental and physical" is also a sort of dualism, and I think we often forget that mental sensations are often closely linked with our physical bodies. One thing we learn as Green Dots is that giving someone water and a snack may help tremendously with what presents as a major mental challenge.
[4] If I disassociate from the sensation in my esophagus, I'm just going to have a worse physical experience in a few minutes.

A couple months ago I mused:

Head, neck, chest, arm, leg, groin, butt, hand, foot, thigh, knee, shin, toe, brow, eye, nose, mouth, tongue, tooth, jaw, ear, hair, thumb, breast.

Body, finger, elbow, shoulder, eyebrow, forearm, forehead, belly, penis.

Vagina.

No wonder "vagina" sounds so awkward: it's the only trisyllablic word for a major externally-accessible body part I can think of. It's also clearly Latin-derived while the others (excerpt penis?) are Germanic. No wonder it needs so much slang.

Recently I realized there is a nice, short, Germanic word for female genitalia: cunt. Even better, it encompasses the whole vulva (another Latin word), not just the passage between the cervix and the labia minora (Latin again). (Acquaint yourself with the relevant anatomy.)

The history of cunt

The etymology of cunt traces at least to Middle English (cunte, "female genitalia"). The first known reference in English apparently is in a compound, Oxford street name Gropecuntlane cited from c.1230 (and attested through late 14c.) in "Place-Names of Oxfordshire" (Gelling & Stenton, 1953), presumably a haunt of prostitutes. Cunt shares cognates in several Old Germanic languages and is perhaps linked to Latin cuneus (wedge) or cunnus (vulva).

Cunt has been considered taboo and impolite since the 15th Century (Shakespeare alluded to the word but didn't use it directly) and obscene and illegal since 1700. This shouldn't be too surprising: genitalia is a fairly universally taboo subject with dozens of slang terms and euphemisms in every language. Cunt was probably considered obscene because it unambiguously refers to a woman's genitals; polite discourse of the time only referred to sex organs indirectly. Even the 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue glossed the word as C**T, The chonnos of the Greek, and the cunnus of the Latin dictionaries; a nasty name for a nasty thing: un con Miege. (emphasis mine). It was impolite to directly refer to women's genitals in a slang dictionary! Contemporary society has dropped many centuries-old taboos, including direct genital discourse in many contexts. So let's also drop the taboo on calling a cunt a cunt.

Twat (origin unknown) gained use in the 1650s, perhaps as a more polite replacement for cunt. It too became considered vulgar, and doesn't seem to have sustained a long literary life, based on this ngrams comparison of cunt, twat, and vulva.

That ngrams graph shows a promising rise in use of cunt in written English since 1950 (after some notable pre-war literary appearances). This may originally have been driven by offensive use. It was then picked up as a common topic by feminist writers; some wanted to banish the term as offensive; others wanted to reclaim the term as powerful. Ngrams suggests that the latter is gaining ground: "her cunt" now appears in twice as many books as "a cunt".

Isn't cunt offensive?

Thanks to context, the word can be both offensive and powerful. It remains offensive to call someone a cunt; it equates the whole of the person with a single sexual body part. It is likewise offensive to call a person a twat or a pussy. Even the accepted medical terms would be offensive if used as an epithet: she's such a vagina is offensive, though vagina and vulva are such awkward words that nobody uses them as insults. Likewise, penis words applied to a person are also offensive: he's such a {dick, prick, schmuck}, though the male versions seem less offensive: a guy's more likely to say I'm a dick sometimes than a gal is to say I'm a cunt sometimes. Calling someone an elbow, a thumb, or another non-head body part is likely offensive, too. One of my favorite exchanges on the old Forum2000 site was Q: My girlfriend is a cunt. A: I think you're making an is-a/has-a error. Many young logicians fail to make this distinction.

When used to refer to a body part rather than a person, cunt is unambiguous and direct, which is powerful. It acknowledges female sex organs as normal, like any other body part. It doesn't imply that a woman's genitals are a cat, a rodent, a mollusk, a food, or any other silly euphemism. Cunt and twat don't try to be cute like coochie, fanny, or vajayjay; instead they fit in with other short, direct, Germanic body parts like head, arm, leg, and groin. You could say that cunt rolls off the tongue.

Vagina comes from medical Latin; vagina in general Latin means sheath, scabbard, and similar enclosing uses. Medically, the vagina is the passage between the uterus and the vulva. Using vagina as the polite and accepted term for the whole of female genitalia denigrates several important components in female anatomy and sexuality, not least of which is the clitoris. Cunt covers the whole kit and caboodle, as does vulva. In a medical context, use vulva to refer to the whole package and vagina to refer to the passage. In a context where belly or gut would sound better than abdomen, use cunt or twat over vulva. Even in medical contexts, Germanic words may be a better choice:

Novick remembers one of the first arguments he had with a prudish supervising clinician who insisted that their HIV questionnaire use the words vaginal secretions when asking women if their partners performed oral sex on them. Novick thought the word choice was preposterous because the clinic served a low-income area with a heavily Latino population. He fought and eventually won over the supervisor when he showed that half the participants didn’t know what vaginal secretions were. But when they were asked if they knew what Novick’s term meant, there was 100 percent comprehension. His choice of words? Cunt juice.

Post script: penis

Researching this post, I was hoping to find a similar nice Germanic word for penis. It's not as awkwardly medical as vagina, but there's a whole host of monosyllabic slang terms like dick, dong, schlong, and wang that sound better. "I'm gonna suck your dick" sounds sexy, "I'm gonna suck your penis" sounds like a procedure. Unfortunately all the Online Etymology Dictionary results for penis are euphemistic. Penis itself was originally Latin for tail, which makes me wonder how to refer to the penis of an animal with a tail. Plug tail and tickle tail appear for penis in 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, with tail itself meaning prostitute and several other tail associations for lewd women. Wikipedia's Penis article claims that English previously used yard, though that also seems derived from a measuring stick. There are more objects shaped like a penis (tail, shaft, tool, wiener) than like a cunt, so perhaps it's natural that people would reuse a term rather than evolve a distinct word. Now pardon me, I need to make a saving throw vs. rod, staff, or wand.

From an email from a recruiter:

… is an excellent company to work for and offers a kick back work environment in which employees can bring their dog to work …

The choice of words is questionable; I think of kick back work environments as, say, customs inspector in Russia or contracts supervisor in Chicago.

This is, however, the second unsolicited recruiter contact I've had in the last couple weeks. So if you're looking for a tech job, make sure your resume is online and up-to-date. At least in this neck of the woods, people are hiring.

Is there a sensible syntax tree for A rose is a rose is a rose? The parse that makes most sense to me is
{a rose is [a rose} is (a rose])
which is not a tree. But the parse
((a rose) is ((a rose) is (a rose)))
is NP is VP at the top level, and that's not generally grammatical (e.g., "Obama is the president lives in the White House").

flwyd how's Frday?
flwyd apparentyl my keyboard doesn't like e tonight
...
flwyd but I'll be delivering cats on Saturday night
evilfuzzymonste oh, wow, I must be sleepy! For a moment, I read that as "De-liver-ing"

In the past few weeks, I've received a few random comments on recent posts (1 2) unrelated to the subject at hand.

Great design, useful info!This resourse is great!Keep it up!With the best regards!
Frank (not frank, natch)

Hello, thanks a lot, You'v done a great job.I can only realize how much time and resources does it take to create such a resource!Great work, I am impressed!

I got another one today on a sweet and geeky post not in the most recent 30, but from all the way back in 2003.

Yes!
Hi! Author, I'll just agree with you.
And just cool design, interesting site name flwyd.livejournal.com :), I see you you're are not newbe. Don't stop the nice job!

This post came from 58.221.255.166. According to my IP Locator Dashboard widget, that's in Jiangsu, China. The others came from Shangdong (60.217.227.135) and Beijing (221.192.34.250).

This has all the hallmarks of spam except one: where's the potted meat? They're not selling anything. They're not linking anywhere. There's no way to contact the poster. Just generic positive comments in odd English.

I can think of two explanations:

1. Chinese Internet users are practicing their English. They've learned some stock phrases, but their comprehension isn't very good, so they don't say anything about the content of the blog.
2. The comments originally contained links with cross-site-scripting attempts and LiveJournal silently removed the Krusty-Os from the Spam, leaving a nice wholesome product.

Wherefore I receive them I care not, because it gave me an opportunity to read a touching post from the past. Do any of my readers have amusing examples of this phenomenon?